August 6, 2011 (TSR)- Sweden’s Ocean Explorer, an ocean exploration team that hunts for sunken ships and cargo, made the discovery inadvertently while hunting for a century-old shipwreck that had several cases of rare champagne. The team, led by Peter Lindberg, was using sonar to survey the Gulf of Bothnia on June 19, in the northern arm of the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland while looking for the shipwreck. Lindberg noticed a large circle, about 60 meters (circa 200 feet) in diameter while studying the sonar scans taken from 87 meters deep (circa 287 feet). The scans revealed a grainy outline of a saucer shape against the dirt in the Gulf of Bothnia, between Sweden and Finland — hinting of a crashed UFO on the ocean floor. Or maybe UO, unidentified object.
“You see a lot of weird stuff in this job, but during my 18 years as a professional I have never seen anything like this even if I have spent hundreds of hours watching sonar images of the sea floor,” Lindberg, the initiator of the expeditions, said.
The placement of the object was even more curious as Lindberg mentioned evidence of the object moving across the ocean floor before it came to rest at the bottom of the Gulf of Bothnia. As the team’s video shows, there appears to be a long trail of 300 meters (circa 984 feet) drag lines leading up to the object in the displaced seabed that suggests that some say the object may have had a rough landing.
Here are enhanced images of the anomaly for study:
Theories spark
The discovery has sparked off several speculations.
Lindberg offered a “new Stonehenge,” though some suspect it’s a natural formation, such as the rim of a small underground volcano, which certainly create a very round, prominent ring.
Others see clear evidence that the object, whatever it is, is too perfectly round to be anything but man-made. Of course, one of the most popular — theory is that it’s a crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft. Some have even suggested it resembles the Millennium Falcon from the Star Wars series, with its distinctive front forks and round shape as Fox News reports.
Here’s another theory: the UO is neither an extraterrestrial craft nor a natural feature but instead a rotating gun turret from a World War II era battleship. It’s possible that an explosion on the ship’s deck could have blown it out of the deck ring where it was anchored and it slid into the ocean’s depths, more or less intact. Such an explosion would not necessarily have sunk the ship, so the lack of nearby wreckage may not be a mystery.
The turret-less ship might have made it back to port, or may have continued to another location where it eventually succumbed and sank. The top-heavy turret would likely have sunk with the cannons face down in the ocean floor, and would not necessarily have been seen in the sonar image. In fact, Lindberg and his crew were originally drawn to the area in search of Swedish merchant ships sunk by the German navy in World War I.
The Ocean Explorer History
The Swedish Ocean Explorer Team are veteran sea scavengers who search for sunken ships and not known as UFO chasers.
Peter Lindberg, the originator of the Ocean Explorer team started his wreck career by finding an Amercian B-17 bomber in 1992 off the Swedish east coast.
In 1994 Peter Lindberg and his companions found information about a ship wreck loaded with champagne and cognac in local court archives. This lead to the great find of the small schooner “Jönköping” in 1997 and the salvage of the same in year 1998. 2400 bottles of Heidsick & Co MONOPOLE Gôut Américain 1907 champagne where recovered from the wreck and raised world record prices when sold at Cristie’s auction house in London.
In 1999 Peter Lindberg and his team found the wreck “Kyros” which had 1000 bottles of cognac and 300 bottles of liquer in her hold. Depth, lack of funding and weather problem has made this project an “unclosed” project so far.
Peter Lindberg has participated in many other wreck projects and salvages and are constantly working on new projects.
A cautionary tale
This is not the first time an unidentified sunken object has led to conjecture. There is the famous underwater mystery of ‘Bimini Road’, a rock formation in the Caribbean that resembles a road. Even though geologists have said that the rocks are naturally formed, there are theorists who link the formation to an unknown civilization or to the lost city of Atlantis.
It is important to note that not all circular and that size is a crashed flying saucer.
Lindberg did not suggest it was a flying saucer. It does not mean that it wasn’t a natural formation, something made by humans, or be an anomaly created by the rough ocean floor and the depth at which the circular object was found. In fact, it might not be as perfectly circular as some speculate simply because the sonar being used didn’t have the ability to discriminate precisely at that depth.
Lindberg has said that he is not interested in further in investigations. While the recovery of an alien craft could potentially be worth billions of dollars, the more likely scenario is that this circular object on the bottom of the ocean is just that… a circular object that has no value at all.
Only the shape, circular, suggests that this might be of alien origin, and that is highly speculative. The most likely explanation is something mundane. Since Lindberg is the man who found it, and since he sees nothing of value there, and in fact, did not suggest it was alien, we would be wise to listen.
With nothing else reported, without further information, the logical conclusion is in the mundane.
Until the experts gives us the real analysis, let’s just call object a UO (unidentified object) unless of course a little green Reptile pops out of it saying he comes in peace. Or not. So hold off the champagne. – TSR
